When you’ve been planning on shopping for an Apple Watch Series 9, right now seems like a good time to make the leap. The smartwatch is at the moment on sale for $299 at a number of retailers, together with Amazon, Best Buy, Target and Walmart. That is not fairly the bottom value we have seen — a pair colorways briefly fell to $269 earlier this month, as an example — however steeper reductions have usually been unusual. This deal takes about $30 off the watch’s typical street price on Amazon, and it is $100 lower than shopping for from Apple straight. As of this writing, the provide applies to the 41mm non-cellular model of the watch in Midnight, Purple, Silver or Starlight. It covers fashions with a rubber, S/M- or M/L-sized Sport Band or a nylon Sport Loop.
This is likely one of the lowest costs we have seen for Apple’s newest wearable.
We gave the Apple Watch Collection 9 a score of 92 in our assessment final September, and it is at the moment the highest choose in our information to the best smartwatches. It runs quick, it is water resistant and it could actually nonetheless deal with many duties that’d usually require an iPhone, from checking iMessages to calling on Siri to utilizing Apple Pay. A lot of the important well being and health monitoring options are nonetheless right here as nicely, as are safety-related instruments like fall detection and an emergency SOS operate. In comparison with the lower-cost Apple Watch SE, it has a barely bigger show that may keep always-on, which makes it much less cumbersome for checking the time at a look.
New to this mannequin is a helpful Double Faucet function, which helps you to reply to notifications with out having to bodily contact the system, and the flexibility to finish many Siri requests on-device, with out having to all the time be on-line. It additionally has double the interior storage (64GB) because the Collection 8, and its show’s peak brightness score (2,000 nits) is twice as excessive.
That stated, the standard caveats with any Apple Watch nonetheless apply. The entire thing will solely work with iPhones. The battery will final most of a typical day however not for much longer. There are higher choices for sleep monitoring. Because of an ongoing patent dispute, Apple has additionally had to disable the watch’s blood oxygen monitoring function. Generally, there isn’t any large must make the change for those who personal an Apple Watch right now and are nonetheless pleased with it. However for those who’re trying to improve right now, this ought to be a pleasant worth.
Observe @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the most recent tech offers and shopping for recommendation.